Bandpass optical flow for tagged MRI

MR tagging has shown great promise for detailed noninvasive cardiac motion imaging. Our research uses low-frequency tags coupled with gradient- based optical flow estimation to compute cardiac motion. We develop here a novel, fast, fully automated optical flow method for tagged MRI by exploiting the Fourier content of the tagged images. This new method, called bandpass optical flow, works by extracting various subband images from tagged cardiac data, and then formulating multiple optical flow constraints for each subband. The resulting system is solved by least squares pseudo-inversion. The proposed method is validated on simulated and real tagged data.